One of the most fun things about
Second Life is designing your avatar. For those of us familiar with
roleplaying games this is easy, we don and doff alternate personas as quickly as real people change shoes. How much or how little these avatars, our second identities, resemble us seems to depend almost entirely on how much we like who we are in
Real Life (tm).
I started out with a prepackaged avatar--you can buy
skins and shapes that someone has already made beautiful for you. But my girl looked a bit artificial to me. . . too "Barbie doll." And, I have to admit, I had fun
redesigning my avatar. . . Tsai is now shaped more like the RL me (well, the tits and ass part anyway, though I am somewhat thicker waisted, more cylindrical where she is hour-glass). Her nose is definitely my nose (kind of pug), and the shape of the face is close, though I think I am more square-jawed. Here's the thing, if you want your av to look like your real self (albeit a bit better) get an artist to help. My artist friend sat next to me as I built my avatar. He'd look at me, then at her on the screen and say, "No, higher cheekbones. Yes. . . No, a bit more muscle in the thighs. Good." and so on. When we were done I still thought she was far too pretty. But then what is the point of making a new you if you don't
make it better?
So we are drawn to recreate ourselves new and better in SL. And we go on gathering friends and having fun, and suddenly second life is work. We get jobs to support our SL lifestyles, we do business, make partnerships, or at least acquire friends and fuck-buddies. It all gets overwhelming and sooner or later we get the idea we need an "alt" (
alternate avatars). C'mon, admit it. How many times have you said you wished you could clone you to do all the things you'd like to do in a day. (For a really good idea of how alternate avatars should work read
David Brin's sci-fi novel Kiln People.) By alternate avatar here I don't mean just changing skins, costumes, or species. I mean a whole new account so you can be multiple different people in SL. But the problem with alternate avatars is (even if you can run multiple computers and have them all going at the same time) you still need to split your attention. Who (avatar-wise) gets to be "on"?
There are some good reasons for alts. Say you want to be
different genders or
different species at times. Or say you need
an avatar for RL work (and, yes, some of us do), for professional reasons you might want to have a different av for fun, too. One couple I know have
alts for when they want private times (sort of like turning the phone off at home--no one can find you if they don't know who you are). Then there's the fellow who uses alts to keep all his lady friends from finding out about his multiple affairs. He has created seven different alts, he calls them "brothers," and each is "faithful" to a separate girlfriend. (I do have to admit I have a problem with this use of alts, as it seems a bit sleazy even to me who makes an
SL living at selling sex!)
For whatever reason, the stats seem to indicate that one in four SL residents have one or more alts, and that if you are into having alts, the average number for an alt user is five. That said I admit, I too have created an alt. But here's the interesting part. Try as I might, she isn't much different from my primary av. I made her a bit less sexy, and I really tried to find blonde hair for her that was more like my real hair (of course, now I find I would like to have that hair on Tsai, too). This leads me back to my original point about identity. How much are our avs like our real selves? Clearly if you are a Neko (the SL term for
Furries, from the Japanese word for cat) your av "looks" different, but are you roleplaying or is this just the real you in a furry suit? If we strive to be more like our RL selves in our SL selves is that an indication of self-liking? Or just a lack of imagination?
All this avatar shaping has made me think about my own identity in RL as well. Are we shaped mentally, emotionally, by the physical bodies we inhabit? Does the color of our hair, our skins, our eyes, really matter? I am more comfortable when my av is a blonde--is that because I have always been a blonde in RL? Here, where I have the chance to be anything, why am I going for the same hair and eye colors?
In RL it seems like most of us aren't happy with the physical forms we are given. If we were, why would we spend so much time, effort, and money to dye our hair, have surgery to change the shape of our breasts, work out to build the perfect abs? If you are prettier or more handsome, are you happier? You might be if that sense of attractiveness could make you more confident. But if we were confident in ourselves--in our Real Lives (tm)--would we need Second Lives at all? We all certainly seem more confident in SL. Women are sexier, men are tougher, everyone is acting happy. In SL it is easy to be confident simply because we tend to stay behind our masks, never showing our real faces to each other. This begs the question: can anything in SL ever be real? Can we ever trust one another when we never really know the other?
I have no answers. I'm just thinking out loud here . . . and wondering about the faces behind my fantasies.
